“Nothing prepared me for the level of vitriol that was going to drop on me from theZionist lobby… personal, vicious stuff came my way… I was left with one really striking puzzlement... If I choose to criticise my country, and I often do, nobody or very few people say I'm not patriotic, certainly no people call me ‘a racist’. They accept that it’s a legitimate thing in a free society to criticise the political and diplomatic behaviour, the domestic and foreign policies of a sovereign state. It doesn't mean that you're not a loyal member of that state, it just means that you disagree with its political behaviour. But if you’re Jewish, as I am, and you criticise the domestic and/or foreign policy of the sovereign state of Israel you are immediately called ‘an anti-Semite’. Very clever isn’t it. You can't criticize the behavior of a sovereign state, a member of the United Nations, without being called ‘a racist’ and of course because of the Holocaust... you know, it's an immenseley sensitive accusation to level at someone, that ‘you're anti-Semite’. And to me that's the most troubling thing, as they say a cuckoo in this academic nest... about a whole discourse that the Western world is ultimately hampered in its ability to criticize, irrespective of more geopolitical considerations, we are still after all these years, restricted in our ability to criticize the straightforward behavior of an elected governement in the state of Israel, for fear that we will be accused if being anti-Semites and that's what I've been spending two years and plus, wrestling with...”

For 11 years, British director Peter Kosminsky worked on the television series "The Promise," in which he draws some unlikely comparisons between modern-day Israel and British-controlled Palestine toward the end of the Mandate period. The four-part series - which prompted fierce debate in Britain for its suggestion that the Holocaust is comparable to the founding of the state of Israel - has now arrived here for the first time since airing in Britain one year ago.(...) Kosminsky, a British resident of Jewish descent, said the series "deals first and foremost with Britain, and is designed for Britain." Thus Israelis will likely identify small inexact details, and they also will likely feel find the narrative to be problematic. (It is depicted via different perspectives, primarily through the eyes of those who ruled here in the past. ) As the series' makers claim, impressions of "The Promise" depend upon the viewer's political outlook.

[Arutz Sheva] March 2012: Op-Ed: Britain's Love-Hate Relationship With the Jews “Kosminsky had Jewish children in the West Bank (which is biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria) attacking Arab families with rocks while the IDF looked on and using a child as a human shield. (...) This is all straight out of the scurrilous and extreme propagandistic anti-Israel ISM handbook.” Millet adds: “The Promise had everything for the Jew hater and Israel hater, but what you won’t see is a series about the Arab violence in British Mandate Palestine between 1936-1939, which was brutally put down by the British and in which some 5,000 Arabs, 300 Jews and 260 Britons were killed, and during which the Peel Commission offered the Arabs 80% of British Mandate Palestine, which the greedy Arab leadership duly rejected.”

Victor Sharpe of Arutz Sheva says: "Not content with adopting every anti-Israel trope that Israel bashers can think up, Kosminsky distorted history to such an extent that to call it pro-Arab propaganda is a monumental understatement."

[The Guardian] Peter Kosminsky: Britain's humiliation in Palestine Peter Kosminsky is one of Britain's most acclaimed directors of hard-hitting television drama. His latest project – 11 years in the making – tells the story of postwar Palestine and Israeli independence through the eyes of a British soldier serving in the territory. It promises to be an event

While you were making yourself look beautiful for your Valentine on monday evening the BBC was showing Geert Wilders: Europe’s Most Dangerous Man?(...) The whole thesis of the film seemed to be that Zionism, Israel and
Jews are the inspiration for Wilders’ alleged incitement to race hate. Two weeks ago the BBC showed Louis Theroux’s The Ultra Zionists, which portrayed Jews as religious fanatics.

The Promise,
by Peter Kosminsky, currently showing on Channel 4, can be best summed
up as ‘rich European Jews came to Palestine after the Holocaust, stole
the Palestinians’ land and murdered British soldiers’.

For his research Kosminsky consulted the International Solidarity
Movement about Israel, which is like basing your views on immigration on
interviews with the BNP.

Last night’s film War Child,
also on Channel 4, was, basically, about ‘Jews’ killing innocent
Palestinians and blinding and disabling Palestinian children who cannot,
now, wait to grow up to kill ‘Jews’.

And now the BBC have shown a documentary which started out as a valid
investigation into Islamophobia in Holland but, which, degenerated into
a gratuitous attack on Jews, Israel and Zionism.

Film-maker Peter Kosminsky has
staunchly defended his drama series The Promise in his first public
comments. Speaking at a Q&A session on Tuesday hosted by the TV
station Al-Jazeera, Mr Kosminsky, 54, said that some reactions had been
“hysterical”.

He said he had received hate mail from
British Jews and that critics labelling The Promise as antisemitic were
“dangerous, a bit like crying wolf”.

The Israeli Embassy in London and the
Zionist Federation led complaints against the drama, set in British
Mandate Palestine, present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Mr Kosminsky said the series, shown on
Channel 4 in February, was aimed primarily at making people aware of
Britain’s role in Palestine in the 1940s

The director said: “I set out to try to
be balanced. There will be individual moments that may not seem
balanced. It’s not a documentary. We interviewed more than 80 survivors
of the British deployment to Palestine in the 1940s. I wanted to remind
British people that we have some culpability in one of the most tragic
and intractable conflicts of our age.” The 30-strong audience included a
small number of Israel supporters who questioned Mr Kosminsky’s
“agenda”.

He replied that the themes in the series had been driven by interviews with British army veterans.

“Most of these guys arrived incredibly
sympathetic to the Jewish plight, but at the end of three years of the
kinds of incidents dramatised in The Promise, their attitudes had
changed.

“This was so strong through the research that I either had to reflect it or abandon the project.

The moment you decide to dramatise that
change, you have a story which starts with a guy who is pro-Jewish, and
ends with a guy who is pro-Arab. I believe that is why some people feel
the show is pro-Palestinian.

“I don’t think my own ethnicity had
anything to do with how I approached this as a story-teller, but that
might be a question for my shrink.”

He added: “If you seek to comment on
the domestic or international policy of Israel, particularly if you are
Jewish, you open yourself up to accusations of antisemitism. I get very
nervous about the light use of the racism label.”|||

“The most striking thing I’m left with is a question: how did we get
from there to here? Like most British soldiers we interviewed, arriving
in Palestine from the war in Europe, Len Matthews felt only sympathy for
the Jewish plight. Having seen the ovens of Bergen-Belsen, his heart
tells him that Jews deserve a place of safety, almost at any price. In
1945, that view was shared by most of the world. In the era inhabited by
Erin, his granddaughter, just 60 years later, Israel is isolated,
loathed and feared in equal measure by its neighbours, finding little
sympathy outside America for its uncompromising view of how to defend
its borders and secure its future. How did Israel squander the
compassion of the world within a lifetime?”

Writer and director Peter Kosminsky has spent seven years making The Promise, a film about the Arab-Israeli conflict. What has he learned?

It's April 1988, about five in the morning, 40km outside Kabul in
Afghanistan. I'm taking shelter in a scrape in the rock, flattening my
cheek against the cold surface, semi-automatic gunfire and the
concussion of departing mortars beating in my ears. In theory, I'm
making a documentary about young Soviet army conscripts in Afghanistan.
In reality, I've been marooned on this "zastava", or mountain outpost,
for days. The 17-year-old kids, who are the heroes of our documentary,
fire back at the attacking mujahideen, in the grip of a kind of
hyper-bravado. I, on the other hand, have leapt from my makeshift
sleeping bag to cower in what passes for cover on this bare outcrop.
"Why am I here?" I ask myself pointlessly, and not for the first time.
"Aren't there safer assignments I could pursue, where nights are spent
between soft sheets? Why am I obsessed with war?"

A quarter of a
lifetime later, I'm still exploring that obsession, trying to bring to
the screen what is, without doubt, the most ambitious, agonising and
creatively troublesome film I've ever undertaken. The Promise,
which screens on Channel 4 from 6 February for four weeks, attempts in
drama to come to an understanding of the most dangerous and intractable
war of our age – the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East –
as seen through the eyes of two outsiders, a British teenager and her
grandfather. Erin Matthews, an 18-year-old just beginning her gap year,
travels to Israel
with her Jewish schoolfriend, Eliza. Eliza, who has dual nationality,
has been summoned back to Israel for military service. Erin goes with
her for moral support, taking a diary written 60 years before by her
grandfather, Len. Fresh from the second world war and the airborne
assault on Germany, Sergeant Len Matthews has been unexpectedly posted –
like 100,000 other British troops – to keep the peace in what was then
called Palestine. As Erin reads his diary, we travel back in time to
witness, with Len, the war at the birth of the state of Israel. And as
Erin reads, she becomes curious about the disputed country beyond the
comfort of Eliza's seaside home. She starts to retrace her grandfather's
steps, beginning a journey through modern-day Israel and the occupied
territories that will see her solve the mystery of why Len's life was
destroyed by the few months he spent in that troubled land.

War
attracts nothing so much as cliche. Perhaps the greatest is that the
first casualty of war is truth. For example, to my knowledge there are
at least three convincing and apparently well-documented explanations of
the killings that took place in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, one of
the emblematic events of the bloody war of 1948. If we were to tiptoe
into the minefield that is Middle-East politics, we had better get our
facts right. For four years, a team of six researchers picked away at
the story of Len and Erin in our two time frames, 1945-48 and today. We
tracked down and interviewed over 80 veterans of the British Mandate in
Palestine (Britain was the colonial power until 1948), studied archives
from the period at the Imperial War Museum, the Airborne Forces Museum
at Duxford and at the public record office in Kew, where thousands of
declassified intelligence reports from the period can still be found and
read. We unearthed unpublished photographs and accounts of the perilous
journey undertaken by Palestinian Arabs in 1948, fleeing their homes in
the face of the advancing Jewish forces. We spoke to Israeli academics
who had interviewed Jewish women used to befriend British soldiers to
covertly extract intelligence from them. And we spoke to their
controllers, the underground fighters of the Irgun Tsvai Leumi, who
fought to a standstill a proud British army fresh from victory in a
world war.

For the present-day story we interviewed Israeli Jewish
boys and girls, conscripted at 18 in defence of their country. We
tracked down children of the same age from overseas, members of the
International Solidarity Movement, who had confronted Israeli bulldozers
to protect the homes of Palestinians in the occupied territories. We
drew on testimony from Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence and
other organisations concerned with the uneasy and undeclared truce in
Israel today. On my own research trips to the region I located and
visited the site of the massacre at Deir Yassin, finding the former Arab
village still intact but, incredibly, now being used as a high-security
hospital for mentally ill patients. I stood in the death cell where
Jewish fighters condemned by the British Mandate government for
insurrection awaited their fate, visited the sites of recent suicide
bombings and gazed out across Israel's protective wall, surely the most
palpable and chilling symbol of division on our planet.

Our
research turned up some surprising facts, counter to common knowledge.
For example, for many years I had believed that the Israeli military had
invented the strategy of destructive reprisals against the families of
insurgents. If a Palestinian blows him or herself up in an Israeli city,
the Israeli Defence Force will locate the family home of that
bomber and bulldoze it. How strange then to discover, as we pored over
records of tactics in Mandate Palestine, that the British used exactly
the same techniques against the Irgun, part-precursors of the
present-day Israeli military, in 1946. If British interests were
attacked by a Jewish "terrorist", the home of that terrorist would be
dynamited, as a matter of policy. Why would the Jews, who demonstrably
defeated the British and their entire tactical handbook, adopt exactly
the same failed anti-insurgency approach as their former masters
when they in turn faced an insurgency? It made no sense but, as we were
to discover, nothing is simple in a land where truth has long since been
co-opted as a weapon of war.

Making the drama in Israel itself
also turned out to be anything but simple. At the outset, it had seemed a
wise decision. Nowhere else looks quite like modern-day Israel – the
topography, the architecture, the physiognomy of its diverse population.
Creating Erin's story elsewhere in the Arab world would be
time-consuming and costly. And where better to stage scenes set in 1940s
Palestine than in the locations where the events had taken place, where
some key buildings survive and others could be readily recreated from
local archive and memory. English is widely spoken, period weapons and
vehicles abound, there's a thriving film industry. It ought to have been
straightforward. In practice, it was anything but. When I dramatised
events from the Bosnian war for Leigh Jackson's Warriors, I faked them
in the Czech Republic. Scenes for my drama about Somalia and Liberia
were recreated in Kenya and Ghana. I did Iraq in Morocco, Pakistan in
India, even Belfast was carefully remounted in the streets of Leeds and
Bradford. Never before had I attempted to dramatise a conflict in the
land in which it was taking place, using ex-combatants and reservists as
actors and extras, local technicians as crew, shooting events still raw
in the memory in the places in which they had occurred. Scenes that
look achievable on paper take on a lively extra dimension when you have
real Israelis and Palestinians playing your roles.

One
particularly difficult scene calls for an actor playing an IDF commander
to use a Palestinian civilian as a human shield while moving through a
dangerous area in Gaza. We had detailed research supporting the event we
were depicting and, by chance, an Israeli soldier had been found guilty
in the courts for using exactly these tactics in the week we were to
shoot the scene. None of these justifications made the sequence any
easier to achieve in the cockpit of unresolved animosities that is
Israel today. The first actor I cast walked out during rehearsals,
explaining politely that, although he knew these things happened,
recreating such an event in a scene with Palestinian actors wasn't
something he was able to do. I recast the part, outlining in
over-elaborate detail to the talented substitute actor we chose what the
scene would involve. When he agreed, I privately assumed he was a
committed liberal, out of sympathy with Israeli military policy. But
when it came to staging the scene, in the predominantly Arab town of
Ramle with Palestinian actors playing opposite him, it became clear that
he had recent military experience in the occupied territories.
Eventually, he revealed that he was an officer in the Israeli army
reserves, spending a weekend a month in uniform. When I asked why, if
that was true, he had been prepared to accept the role he said: "These
things happen. We need to confront them." And confront them he did, in
one of the most distressing and powerful scenes in the film.

In
episode three of The Promise, Erin travels to Hebron in the occupied
West Bank. We used her visit as an opportunity to restage a scene from
our research, where a Jewish settler faces off angrily against an Arab
resident. The actors involved wanted to be photographed together at the
end of what was an unremittingly aggressive confrontation. "The image
you'll never see in The Promise," said the Jewish actor as she posed
arm-in-arm with her Arab fellow actor. Later she told me that, in a long
career on stage and screen in Israel, this was the first time she had
ever acted with a "real Palestinian". It had taken the arrival of a
foreign film crew, not realising the magnitude of what it was they were
asking, to bring this thing about.

So what have they taught
me, my seven years engaged with the inciting conflict of our
terrorist-obsessed age? The most striking thing I'm left with is a
question: how did we get from there to here? Like most British soldiers
we interviewed, arriving in Palestine from the war in Europe, Len
Matthews felt only sympathy for the Jewish plight. Having seen the ovens
of Bergen-Belsen, his heart tells him that Jews deserve a place of
safety, almost at any price. In 1945, that view was shared by most of
the world. In the era inhabited by Erin, his granddaughter, just 60
years later, Israel is isolated, loathed and feared in equal measure by
its neighbours, finding little sympathy outside America for its
uncompromising view of how to defend its borders and secure its future.
How did Israel squander the compassion of the world within a lifetime?
That's the question The Promise sets out to explore. Its other purpose
is to act as a reminder to all of us Brits who shake our heads and
mutter "not our problem". As the departing colonial power, Britain
was charged with seeing both communities to independence in good order.
In Palestine, as in so many other examples of our rapid retreat from
empire, we left chaos, political confusion, bloodshed and war. It turns
out that it is our problem, at least in part, and we should take some
responsibility for it.

A core moral message from
the WW2 Jewish Holocaust is “never again to anyone”. Accordingly,
decent , anti-racist, humanitarian Jews speak out against the
Palestinian Genocide and the racist abuses of Apartheid Israel but this
ethical behavior typically elicits false defamation by pro-Zionists as
exampled below. All decent folk must defend anti-racist Jews from false
defamation by pro-Zionists.

“The Promise” is a UK TV series based on the
experiences of 80 of the 100,000 UK soldiers who served in post-war
Palestine in the 1940s. This TV series in four episodes was written and
directed by Jewish British writer, director and producer Peter
Kosminsky, with music by outstanding Jewish British composer Debbie
Wiseman MBE, and premiered on 6 February 2011 on the UK Channel 4. "The
Promise" deals with a young woman going to Israel/Palestine of today,
using her visit to investigate her soldier grandfather's part in the
post-war phase of the British Mandate of Palestine. The series drew
virulent criticism from pro-Zionists in Britain (see “The Promise (2011
TV serial)”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_%282011_TV_serial%29 ) and from Australian pro-Zionists after it was shown in Australia in 2011.

According to the Australian Jewish News (12 January
2012), ““Insidious”, “racist” and “a landmark in the creeping
rehabilitation of anti-Semitism in Western culture”. These are just some
of the terms used to describe The Promise in a 20-page letter of
complaint submitted this week to the SBS ombudsman by the Executive
Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ)” (Australian Jewish News, TV series
akin to Nazi propaganda”, 12 January 2012: http://www.jewishnews.net.au/tv-series-the-promise-akin-to-nazi-propaganda/24212 ).

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, “ Australia 's
peak Jewish body is seeking to halt promotion and DVD sales of the SBS
series, “ The Promise” , a dramatic portrayal set in Israel it
has likened to Nazi propaganda. The Executive Council of Australian
Jewry (ECAJ) said the British-made drama, inspired by accounts of
British soldiers who served in Palestine during the 1940s, was
anti-Semitic and in direct violation of the SBS code covering prejudice,
racism and discrimination… The television drama prompted a similar
reaction following its screening in Britain last year. The UK 's Office
of Communications received 44 complaints about the series, which was not
found to be in breach of its code” (see Leesha McKenny, “SBS fields
complaints over series set in Israel ”, Sydney Morning Herald, 17
January 2012: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/sbs-fields-complaints-over-series-set-in-israel-20120116-1q37z.html ” .

Further, the Jewish writer-director of “The Promise”
Peter Kosminsky has stated that the 80 British veterans interviewed
during research for “ The Promise” had arrived in Palestine
''very pro-Jewish … but by the end of their stay had almost all shifted
their allegiance and were feeling a great deal of sympathy for the
Arabs''.

The detailed letter of complaint by the Executive
Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) to the partly taxpayer-funded
multicultural TV SBS TV network makes the following key but false and
profoundly offensive argument: “ The internationally accepted “ Working Definition of Antisemitism ”10 includes the following passage: Examples
of the ways in which Antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the
state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include: •
denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by
claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour. •
drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
” and then goes on to consider the reality that the writer-director of
the series is Jewish: “ The fact that the writer-director of the
series, Peter Kosminsky, is Jewish has no bearing on the present
complaint, which requires an assessment to be made of the objective
effect of the material complained of. Kosminsky's subjective motives
are therefore irrelevant and cannot be known with any certainty. No
person's public statements to explain their motives can simply be
accepted at face value. It is in any event false to assume that Jews
cannot be the authors of material which is objectively antisemitic. As
Howard Jacobsen observed: “ It matters not a jot to me that the
writer/director of The Promise is a Jew. Jews succumbing to the age-old
view of them and reviling what's Jewish in themselves has a long
history” . 29 In his most recent book, A Lethal Obsession ,
the acclaimed historian of Antisemitism, Robert Wistrich, devotes an
entire chapter to “Jews against Zion .” He summarizes the history of
antisemitic Jews starting with the apostates in Christian Spain after
the massacres of the Jews in 1391 and concludes: “Self-hating Jews,
whatever their motives for betraying their own people and negating its
history, have throughout the ages provided invaluable ammunition for the
Antisemites. That still remains the bottom line.” 30 ” (for the full text of the letter of complaint see: http://www.australiansforpalestine.net/56857 ).

Before dealing with this routine, false, Zionist
defamation of anti-racist Jewish critics of Israel as “anti-Semites”, a
brief history lesson is required.

Palestine is part of the Fertile Crescent that was
a key area of nascent human agrarian civilization (see outstanding
Jewish American scholar Professor Jared Diamond's “Guns, Germs and
Steel”) and in the first millennium BC was inhabited by Philistines
(whence the name) and a number of Semitic tribes, including genocidal
Hebrews/Israelites, the precursors of the Jews, whose horrendous ethnic
cleansing crimes are proudly recorded in the Old Testament of the Holy
Bible. Jewish Israeli historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention
of the Jewish People” has made the key points that there is no Egyptian
record of the Exodus from Egypt, there was no huge David and Solomon
Empire, there was no Exile from Palestine in 136 AD (only some defeated
Jewish rebels and their families were taken as slaves by the victorious
Romans) and that the Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians in the early
Christian era variously converted to Christianity and thence to Islam
i.e. the direct genetic and cultural descendants of those Jewish and
non-Jewish Palestinians of 2,000 years ago are the present day
Palestinians whereas the Jewish Israelis largely derive from Berber,
Yemeni and Khazar converts to a more universalist Judaism in the first
millennium CE.

Political Zionism arose in the late 19th century
but was opposed by Orthodox Jews as heretical and blasphemous (Orthodox
Judaism posits that Jews can only return to Zion after the Messiah
arrives to present the glory of the Lord to all mankind) and was also
opposed by secular, assimilated Jews who simply wanted to get on with
their lives in the European countries or regions their forebears had
inhabited for up to 2 millennia. Indeed in Hungary about half the
Jewish population converted to Christianity from the mid-19th century
onwards to avoid anti-Semitic restrictions. Even Theodor Herzl, the
founder of Zionism, was not dogmatic about settling Palestine and
considered Argentina (recently ethnically cleansed of Indigenous
Indians) as a suitable alternative (see Theodor Herzl, “ Palestine or
Argentine?” in “The Jewish State”, 1896: http://mideastweb.org/jewishstate.pdf
). Indeed there were some 20 possible locations on all continents for a
Jewish Colony/Jewish State (see Martin Gilbert, “Jewish History Atlas”,
p95) including the plan to settle North West Australia that was finally
vetoed by the Australian Labor Government in 1944 (see “An Unpromised
Land” by Leon Gettler).

The Allied conquest of much of the Ottoman Empire
in WW1 enabled the British to offer Palestine as a Jewish Home (not a
Jewish State) through the 1917 Balfour Declaration that was designed to
get Russian Zionist support for keeping Russia in the war: “ His
Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. ”
In 1880 there were about 0.5 million Indigenous Palestinians and 25,000
Jews in Palestine , half the latter being immigrants. Post-WW1 Jewish
immigration brought the Jewish proportion of the population to one
third by 1947. Arab resistance to this alienation of their country grew
to revolt in the middle 1930s. In 1944 pro-Zionist Churchill got the war
cabinet to agree to the eventual Partition of Palestine. At that time
ha was also persuaded by the Zionists to veto the Joel Brand plan to
save 0.7 million Hungarian Jews from the Nazis (0.4 million died
including all but about a dozen of my family) (see “Joel Brand,
Exposing Zionist complicity in Nazi mass murder of Hungarian Jews”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/brand-joel-exposing-zionist-complicity-in-nazi-mass-murder-of-hungarian-jews
and “Lenni Brenner. Exposing Zionist collaboration and complicity with the Nazis”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/brenner-lenni-exposing-zionist-collaboration-and-complicity-with-the-nazis
” ).

US-promoted UN recognition of a race-based State
of Israel and British withdrawal left the Arabs at the mercy of Zionist
terrorists. 800,000 Palestinians fled Zionist terrorist violence that
ethnically cleansed cities, towns and villages that had been inhabited
continuously by Palestinians for thousands of years. Apartheid Israel
seized all of Palestine and a big chunk of Egypt and Syria in 1967 and
occupied a large part of Lebanon in 1982-2000. The Sinai was eventually
returned to Egypt but Apartheid Israel almost completely ethnically
cleansed the Golan Heights ( Syria ) and has continued to ethnically
cleanse the West Bank . The human cost to Palestinians of the US-,
Canada-, UK-, EU- and Apartheid Australia-backed Zionist enterprise
has been horrendous: 0.1 million violent deaths (1936-2012) and 1.9
million avoidable deaths from war-, expulsion- and occupation-imposed
deprivation (1950-2012) i.e. 2.0 million war-related deaths. Since 1950
Palestinian under-5 infant deaths inside and outside Palestine have
totaled 0.75 million and refugees now total over 7 million. Of about 12
million Palestinians only the adults of 1.5 million Palestinian Israelis
can vote for the government ruling all of Palestine (plus part of
Syria), albeit as third class citizens subject to Nazi-style race laws –
democracy by genocide. 1.6 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them
children ) are abusively confined to the Gaza Concentration Camp, 2.6
million Occupied Palestinians are abusively confined to ever-dwindling
West Bank mini-Bantustans and about 6 million Palestinians living
outside Palestine are effectively forbidden to even live in the Homeland
continuously inhabited by their forebears for thousands of years to
the dawn of history. This is an ongoing Palestinian Holocaust and a
Palestinian Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide
Convention (see “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ and the recent multi-author book “The Plight of the Palestinians”: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ).

Of course globally the racist Zionist impact is
much worse. The Zionist-promoted US War on Muslims has since 1990 been
associated with 12 million Muslim deaths from violence or from war- and
occupation-imposed deprivation, the breakdown being 4.6 million (Iraq),
5.0 million (Afghanistan ), 2.2 million (Somalia) and 50,000 (Libya)
(see “Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/
). The Zionist-dominated US dominates Spaceship Earth on which 18
million people die avoidably from deprivation every year (see “Body
Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/
) . The Zionist-dominated US is hell-bent on climate change inaction
and continued disproportionate greenhouse gas pollution, yet it is
estimated that 10 billion people – including 3 billion Muslims - will
perish this century if man-made climate change is not requisitely
addressed (see “Climate Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ).

For anti-racist Jews and indeed all anti-racist
humanitarians the core moral messages from the Jewish Holocaust (5-6
million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and from the more general
WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy dead) are
“zero tolerance for racism”, “never again to anyone”, “bear witness” and
“zero tolerance for lying”. Yet for anti-racist Jews Peter Kosminsky
and Debbie Wiseman the reward for their ethical and humane behavior is
to be falsely defamed by pro-Zionists as “anti-Semites”.

One must turn to other even more eminent, anti-racist
Jews for expert opinions on the genocidal, racist Zionist, Apartheid
Israel enterprise. Thus “Jews Against Racist Zionism” (see: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/home
) is an alphabetically ordered compendium of such anti-racist Jewish
opinion. Further, many outstanding Jewish humanitarians have spoken out
against Israeli Apartheid that is worse that South African Apartheid
according to Jewish and non-Jewish heroes in the fight against
Apartheid Israel-backed Apartheid South Africa and indeed back boycotts
against Apartheid Israel just as boycotts were successfully applied
against Apartheid South Africa (see “Boycott Apartheid Israel”: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottapartheidisrael/ ).

Below are some opinions of outstanding anti-racist
Jewish intellectuals that are relevant to the message of “The
Promise”and the pro-Zionist backlash.

Consider the words of outstanding Jewish American
scholar Professor Jared Diamond who in his best-selling book "Collapse”
(Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) enunciated the "moral principle, namely
that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or
exterminate another people" – an injunction grossly violated by racist
Zionist (RZ)-run Apartheid Israel and its racist, genocide-committing
and genocide-ignoring US Alliance backers.

Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor-General of Australia (circa 1946) :
“The honour of Jews throughout the world demands the renunciation of
political Zionism" and "the Zionist movement as a whole...now places its
own unwarranted interpretation on the Balfour Declaration, and makes
demands that are arousing the antagonism of the Moslem world of nearly
400 millions, thereby menacing the safety of our Empire, endangering
world peace and imperiling some of the most sacred associations of the
Jewish, Christian, and Moslem faiths. Besides their inherent injustice
to others these demands would, I believe, seriously and detrimentally
affect the general position of Jews throughout the world."

Jewish Israeli Professor Avi Shlaim ( Professor of
International Relations at Oxford University , UK , and the author of
“The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World” and of “Lion of Jordan: King
Hussein's Life in War and Peace” (2006): “ “ The only way to make sense
of Israel 's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the
historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948
involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians … This brief review
of Israel 's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to
resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly
unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates
international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises
terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political
purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and
it must wear it. Israel 's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its
Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding
the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians,
like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes
of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.”

Professor Bertell Ollman ( professor of politics at
New York University ) (2004): “An all out struggle against Zionism by
Jews, therefore, is also the most effective way to fight against real
anti-Semitism. Furthermore, if Zionism is indeed a particularly virulent
form of nationalism and, increasingly, of racism and if Israel is
acting toward its captive minority in ways that resemble more and more
how the Nazis treated their Jews, then we must also say so. For obvious
reasons, the Zionists are very sensitive about being compared to the
Nazis (not so sensitive that it has restrained them in their actions but
enough to bellow "unfair" and to charge "anti-Semitism" when it
happens). Yet, the facts on the ground, when not obscured by one or
another Zionist rationalization, show that the Zionists are the worst
anti-Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no
nation has done since the Nazis.”

Decent anti-racist humanitarian Jews and indeed all
decent people are obliged to speak out against the genocidal crimes of
racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel . The false defamation of
anti-racist humanitarian Jews as “anti-Semites” can be seen as
anti-Semitism itself as can the utterly false conflation of the
genocidal atrocities of Apartheid Israel with decent, anti-racist Jews.
Decent people around the world must (a) defend anti-racist Jews against
false defamation by pro-Zionists, (b) inform everyone they can about the
genocidal crimes of Apartheid Israel, (c) urge and apply Boycotts,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against race-based, nuclear terrorist
Apartheid Israel and (d) urge everyone to sideline racist Zionists from
public life, as has already happened with racists such as Nazis,
neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and the KKK.

« The North Koreans have developed a nuclear weapon, tested nuclear weapons (…) If North Korea continues on this course, it should be wiped off the face of the map. It would be an excellent message and a very clear one to the rest of the world and especially to the Iranians... » (Dan Gillerman)

[Jerusalem Post] When Israel fought North Korea One could be forgiven for thinking that Israel does not have a dog in this fight. After all, North Korea is some 8,000 kilometers away and would appear to be too busy stirring up trouble with its own neighbors to bother with the Jewish state. But that is far – very, very far – from being the case.

[Wikipedia] Israel–North Korea relations Israeli-North Korean relations are very hostile, and North Korea does not recognise the state of Israel, denouncing it as an "imperialist satellite".[1] Since 1988 it recognises the sovereignty of the State of Palestine over the territory held by Israel.

Arnon Milchan Pulls the Plug on North Korean Film : New Regency Chairman, Arnon Milchan has ditched plans to produce a paranoid thriller starring Steve Carell that was to be set in North Korea.
The decision came after hackers calling themselves the 'Guardians of
Peace' threatened to attack theaters showing “The Interview,” which
centers on an assassination attempt against dictator Kim Jong-un. The
country has denied involvement but praised the hackers.

Amy Pascal is stepping down as co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Pascal’s departure, which was announced Thursday
morning, comes roughly two months after Sony was revealed to be the
victim of a massive hacking scandal that exposed trade secrets, employee
information and embarrassing emails at the alleged direction of North
Korea over Sony’s film “The Interview.”According to statements issued by
Pascal, who is Jewish, and Sony, Pascal will step down in May... (...)
However, the studio had recently faced questions
from its investors about its financial practices, and its movies had
not performed well in 2013. In addition, Pascal’s reputation was badly
damaged when the cyber attack raised fundamental questions about the
company’s security practices and revealed emails between Pascal and
other executives that included insulting assessments of big-name talents
such as Angelina Jolie and racially insensitive jokes about President
Obama, whom Pascal had supported politically. Pascal was presented with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Award in 2008.
Est-ce que ça va la protéger d'une enquête approfondie sur le
"hacking" de Sony Pictures (qui était clairement une intox dans le but
de démoniser la Corée du Nord)?

Extrait de l'article qui a révélé ces chiffres:
"This would provide diplomatically interesting results. For example,
using the State Department search engine, the top 10 countries for whom
“unacceptable” was most often used in conjunction with since the start
of the Obama administration: Syria (147), Iran (118), North Korea (115),
Israel (87), Pakistan (83), Russia (78), Egypt (77), China (74),
Afghanistan (66), and Iraq (63)." (Source: Sorry, But North Korea Isn’t a State Sponsor of Terrorism, by Micah Zenko)

Inside radical right-wing group Lehava
Journalist who spent two and a half months undercover as activist in
anti-assimilation organization offers glimpse into group that is putting
Israel's democracy to one of its sternest tests in recent years.

One week following a series of arrests culminating in the apprehension of 17 members of his radical anti-assimilation organization, including his own, the leader of Lehava condemned police for violating the group’s freedom of speech. Lehava head Bentzi Gopstein, who was arrested last Tuesday and remains under house arrest for incitement after three young members of his organization were arrested for allegedly vandalizing the nation’s largest Arab-Jewish school, said his group has been unfairly targeted. “We aren’t conducting any terror,” said Gopstein during a Sunday interview with Channel 2. “We act only according to the law. But it annoys and bothers [leftists] that there are so many [of us] and so much support, so this is what they do: arrest.”(...)

Flashback: Hundreds of Jews threw stones at
cars in Jerusalem for several hours on Yom Kippur eve, and eyewitnesses
reported that dozens of vehicles were damaged.
Some of the cars damaged Tuesday night belonged to Palestinians; others were vehicles belonging to hospitals in the city.

Among the remarks posted online were “It is good to kidnap soldiers”, “Zionists flee because you’ll soon be killed by a car” and words expressing hope that right-wing Jewish activist Yehuda Glick, who survived an assassination attempt in October, would die a painful death, the indictment said. All eight were arrested earlier this month in what police said was their biggest operation yet aimed at halting incitement to violence on social networks.

Far-right Israeli won’t apologize for calling Muhammad a pig
In 2012, Morris spat at Arab MK Ahmad Tibi during a debate at Bar-Ilan
University, and in 2013 was arrested on suspicion of involvement in vandalizing Jerusalem’s Monastery of the Cross. Vandals spray-painted “price tag,” “Happy Hanukkah, victory for the Maccabees” and “Jesus — son of a whore” on a wall of the monastery. She was later released without being charged.

Why Israelis Are Angry About the ‘Homeland’ Finale
(...) The Emmy Award-winning “Homeland” is actually based on the
Israeli series “Prisoners of War,” which Makov said made the Begin line
“especially irritating.” In 1977, Begin won a landslide victory as head
of the right-wing Likud Party to become prime minister of Israel. Two
years later, he agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of
the historic Camp David Accords peace treaty, for which he and
President Anwar Sadat won a joint Nobel Peace Prize. Gideon Raff, the
creator of the Israeli series and an executive producer for the U.S.
show, did not comment to Ynet.

US Show Compares Israeli PM to Taliban (...) In
1946, Irgun fighters planted bombs in the King David hotel. They then
repeatedly called the hotel to warn that bombs had been planted – but
the officers who took their call refused to evacuate. The bomb went off
with the building still occupied, killing 91 people, 28 of them British
citizens. Begin was not a part of the attack, but accepted responsibility as the head of the group.

‘Homeland’ Season Finale Stirs Controversy After Comparing Menachem Begin to Taliban Leader
(...) In the season 4 finale episode, which aired on Dec. 21, CIA black
ops director Dar Adal, played by F. Murray Abraham, justifies a deal he
made with a Taliban leader by referencing Begin. He makes the remarks
in a conversation with former CIA director Saul Berenson, a Jewish
character played by Mandy Patinkin. “Menachem Begin killed 91 British
soldiers at the King David Hotel before becoming Prime Minister,” Adal
said, referencing the 1946 bombing at the King David hotel in Jerusalem
carried out by the Irgun, a right-wing militant Jewish organization
headed by Begin.